The number of pieces of technology and devices installed in buildings, e.g. sensors or actuators, is increasing. The installed technology for the most part possesses no “positional awareness”, i.e. the installed technology or the installed devices cannot report the site at which they are located in a building to a higher-level system (e.g. building management system, control system, control room), e.g. for the creation of inventories. This causes high costs and effort, since this reporting for the most part has to take place manually.
In this context, the position of the devices may be captured manually by a service technician, usually in an imprecise manner. If this step has taken place, even with the risk that false data has been captured, the higher-level system knows about the installation site of the devices. However, if there is no communication channel from the higher-level system to the installed device, then said device (e.g. sensor, actuator, controller) may not know its own position. Without this information, the device may operate less efficiently. It is also difficult to perform maintenance or troubleshooting on the device efficiently, since the required manual reconciliation between a plan (setpoint position data) and the device in the field (actual position data) may be prone to errors.